The measure of true civilization is indicated by the degree of respect in which one person holds the rights of another; every man and woman, so long as not encroaching on the rights of others, is inviolably entitled to act, and, a fortiori, to think, to believe, to pray, as he or she wishes. The French Government, by preventing certain categories of citizens from acting together, solely because their ideas are not its ideas, has gone backward several centuries on a capital point, and has resurrected one of the most shameful practices of the past, the misdemeanor of opinion. _THE SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE._ The congregations dissolved and dispersed, nothing now remained but the final act in that great tragedy which had been progressing for more than one hundred years. The proposal was in order to lay the axe at the roots of religious life, and by one fell stroke to extinguish the very existence of the Catholic Church in France. Years have passed since this last work was begun; the Church has not been extinguished; she is even rising to a greater, a more glorious life; the promise of Christ is showing its realization in the midst of a people who, but yesterday, were ready to sing the requiem over her ruins. The project of separating Church and State was no new notion in France; it was a very old article in the republican programme. Away back in the days of the Convention, in 1795, it had already been proclaimed and put into force. Again in 1830 and in 1848 it was put forward by a faction of the republican party. Under the Empire, especially during the discussions as to the French occupation of the City of Rome, it was made a part of the democratic platform. In a session of the Corps Legislatif on December 3, 1867, Jules Simon made a very bitter speech in favor of such separation. The following year Henri Brisson advocated much the same object when denouncing the payment of salary to the clergy. It was, however, during the period of the Third Republic that the project began to receive attention in a practical sense, and formed the ideal towards which policies of Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Paul Bert and their like aspired. All efforts in this direction had proved abortive, not that the project was at all displeasing to the anti-clerical governments, but rather because the people were not "prepared;" and most of all it was necessary first so to weaken the Church in her functional life, that when the separation should come, it must mean her annihilation.